Adobe helps search engines crawl Flash sites

Adobe is helping Google and Yahoo to crawl previously hidden parts of the internet which use Flash

Adobe is passing new technology to Yahoo and Google to allow the companies to improve search within rich internet applications (RIAs) and Flash files.

Search engines already examine some content of Flash files in websites, such as static links and text, but their dynamic nature makes them hard to analyse in the usual way.

Google has already integrated the technology into its search engine, allowing users to search areas of the internet previously hidden to the tool from today. Yahoo plans to add the feature in an upcoming update.

"Until now it has been extremely challenging to search the millions of RIAs and dynamic content on the web, so we are leading the charge in improving search of content that runs in Adobe Flash Player," says David Wadhwani, general manager and vice president of the Platform Business Unit at Adobe.

Developers using Adobe's technology to create dynamic sites won't have to make any changes for the pages to become searchable, as the new technology will allow Google and Yahoo to crawl them much as they would normal static websites.

"Google has been working hard to improve how we can read and discover SWF files," says Bill Coughran, senior vice president of engineering at Google. "Improving how we crawl dynamic content will ultimately enhance the search experience for our users."